I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Edgar Allan Poe

Mysteriously obscure, cryptically secret...

"I am parched with thirst, and perishing,
But drink of me, the ever-flowing spring on the right,
where there is a fair cypress.
Who are you? Where are you from?
I am a child of Earth and of starry Heaven, but my race is of Heaven alone."

Hector Berlioz...a romantic self-portrait.

“Symphonie Fantastique” in 3 parts which include,“A Ball”, “The March to the Scaffold” and “The Witches' Sabbath”.

The story is this...

A young musician with a nervous disposition and an ardent imagination, hopelessly in love, poisons himself with opium in a fit of desperation. The dose he takes is not enough to kill him, rather he sinks into a heavy sleep. In his sickly mind, the strangest visions appear and all sensations and recollections are transformed into musical thoughts and figures. Most of all he experiences the volcanic love inspired by his beloved, his insane alarm, his furious jealousy, the return of joy when he sees her and his consolation in religion.

At the ball he finds his beloved once again amid the festivities.

His heart is gripped in torment...that if she should deceive him....

He dreams he has killed her, she whom he loves, and that sentenced to death, he is lead to the scaffold. The cortège moves with gloomy, sinister, heavy footsteps following the loudest cries. At his end she appears again for a moment, a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow of the guillotine!

He sees himself at a sabbath...

In the midst of a ghastly throng of wizards, shades and monsters, assembled for his funeral; howls, explosions of laughter, shrieks answering, a myriad of strange sounds, his beloved appears, a joyful howl at her entrance. She joins the devilish orgy in an obscene and grotesque sabbath dance, a funeral knell.

Berlioz was an idealist who was at odds with the world in many respects - a man of great passions, his honesty and directness often alienated others.

Symphonie Fantastique is an autobiographical representation of his obsession with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.

"A Dream Within A Dream"

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
Your are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allen Poe

Come away O human child!
...to the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand,
for the world's more full of

weeping than you can understand.
William Butler Yeats

Rest not!
Life is sweeping by;
go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime,
leave behind to conquer time.
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

SONG TO PAN

SONG TO PAN

Should the raven catch your hair

And seat a king of scarlet

Upon the heart's steep stair

Then, oh, the sights you will see there

A breaking of the crystal

Under a dark green glare.

A dark green glare, from eyes on fire,

From pools of deepest amber-

Circle your castle round with briar,

Still Pan will find your chamber.

Fill it to the brim, don't say when,

Drink your fill and drink again.

Hear the ocean roaring.

Fill it to the brim, don't say when

It's Pan that keeps on pouring.

Walnut hands, the eyes of a bear

He who seeks his sorrows out

May find the lion's share.

With self-same breath He tempts and warns

The fire that keeps the chill at bay

Is the very flame that burns.

The flame that burns, the song that slays,

When you hear what it is saying

Let panic chase us through the maze,

But Pan is only playing.

Fill it to the brim, don't say when

Drink your fill and drink again,

Hear the ocean roaring.

Fill it to the brim, don't say when,

It's pan that keeps on pouring.

Dark watcher with tangled brows

Puts his finger to his lips,

Let's hear no more of vows,

Of promises we'll never keep,

Nor of the secret dream

That slips away as we rise from sleep.

As we rise from sleep,

As we rub our eyes,

To set the salt tears falling,

You cover your ears to drown his cries

Yet Pan just keeps on calling.

By Mark Simos (The Spiral Dance)

Mysteriously obscure...

"While the objects around me--while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy--while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this--I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up". The fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe.